Lidia Rossner's Film "Artistic Office" Screening at EASA2014

News from Jul 28, 2014

MAVMA Lecturer Lidia Rossner's film "Artistic Office: constructing the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art" is screening at the 13th European Association of Social Anthropologists Biennial Conference, 2014.

The conference takes place between 31st July - 3rd August, 2014 and is hosted by the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Estonian Institute of Humanities, Tallinn University, Estonia.

Artistic Office (2012) aims to shed insights onto the workings of a large-scale international art exhibition. Comprised of visible forms of complex social processes, the film attempts to expose the mechanisms of how an exhibition is conceptualized and realized. The 7th Berlin Biennale for contemporary art was a discourse-oriented performative exhibit, which attempted to transform the reality of contemporary politics through socially engaged art. The underlying focus of my research was to understand how culture is constructed within an elite art institution, what collaborations and negotiations take place, and how power hierarchy is manifested. I traced lines of thinking involved in the collective process of constructing the biennale, both in terms of artistic production within a defined conceptual framework, and in the curatorial realization of the project in creating a shared context and meaning. The main protagonist is a process, the articulation of an idea from linguistic to visual form in a collaborative trans-cultural context. This process is revealed through the transformation trajectory of ideas as manifested in collaborations, decision- making, and interpersonal relationships. It is presented through the prism of the artistic office team, led by curator Artur Zmijewski and associate curator Joanna Warsza, in a construct of multi-layered fragments evolving parallel to the Biennale.